So, Good Things Continue to Happen

Good things continue to happen, despite the monumentally disappointing end to Lost. Even then, the series is over, so I only have one addiction on the screen, my beloved Mad Men, provided it doesn't go off the rails. In fact, if I could find a way to watch it on the intertubes the way that you could watch Lost the next day on ABC.com or Hulu or -- there was some other site that I found that was pretty good, but I can't remember it's name -- I'd probably ditch cable altogether. I can do it. I swear! I've done it before.

The rickety state of the economy, especially the part that directly affects my life from paycheck-to-paycheck and leads to furloughs and layoffs (for staff only, but still) and who knows what disasters in the future, makes me look around to see where I can cut corners. Cable is one place, using the phenomenally inefficient central air system in my apartment is another. Hence, I am sitting in my apartment with the humidity at a saturation point. At least the air itself is not hot, yet. That's o.k. The humidity is good for the skin.

I'm still lucky. I have a job. The same can't be said for some of our staff, who will be laid off. That's right, choose the least expensive and most vulnerable employees and cut them, not the massively overpaid vice presidents of vice presidents hired by our crook of a former president. We also only have four furlough days, although the school decided to assign them to us. We don't get to pick which days because then the students would be aware that budget cuts impact the faculty and therefore the quality of the education that they are paying for. I'm rather in Roxie's camp on this one, that these efforts to "protect the student" just makes the impact of cuts invisible and promotes the "Excellence Without Money" mentality.

Seriously, Roxie and Historiann, make t-shirts! Or pins, at least. There is a market. I tell my colleagues about the slogan and they all want a t-shirt. In fact, I was speaking with one woman -- someone about whom I was suspicious because of her connection to the Nemesis, but she seems o.k. now -- who took a position in which she was supposed to bring outside speakers to campus. She was told to do it with no money whatsoever. She couldn't draw on faculty, like I did, and was explicitly told "no" when she tried. She finally stepped down from the job and went back to teaching because she had been put in an impossible position. "Excellence without money," I said. She knew.

The dreary weather is getting to me. I meant this to be a post about good things, not depressing things. Good things do continue to happen.

As I wrote in the comments on my third to last post, I received two out of three readers reports on my book proposal. Both were absolutely glowing. Furthermore, the press had included the article that I revised earlier this year, just as a sample of what I can do on the subject. I think they let the readers assume that it was a chapter. In any case, the readers praised the article to high heaven.

"Is this me they are writing about," I thought, at first. Then, "Hell, yeah it's me!"

This is a spectacular idea, I know. I'm so afraid someone else is going to do it before I get done, it's such a good idea. Still, when other people validate the good thoughts, and when they want to help you see that good thought come to fruition, well, very little can surpass the feeling.

In fact, just the act of researching and thinking about and writing this project is like nothing that I've done before. My dissertation became the thing that I had to do to get the PhD. Sure, I was interested in the topic, but the end was the point, not the means. I was in a profoundly ambivalent place at that point in my career, and decided that, if I didn't get the PhD, then the previous too-damn-many years of my life would have been wasted. So, I finished the dissertation.

Turning it into a book would have been impossible if I had become bogged down in revisions before I had sent it to the publisher -- or even if I had looked at it before I sent it to the publisher. No one believes me, but I just printed the damn thing out, boxed it up, and sent it in. That they wanted to publish it still amazes me; but, of course, some revisions were necessary. I could never have done them if I hadn't already had the contract because I was so incredibly over and done with the subject. Seriously, I hardly think about it anymore, and if someone wanted me to speak on it, I'd be at a loss.

Then, there was the tourist book, which I'm more proud of than I should be. The function of that book was to maintain my sense of self as an intelligent, capable historian and writer. I know it has tons of flaws, including in the research, but that has more to do with the form of a tourist book than with my abilities. Still, I wasn't obsessed by it. It wasn't a puzzle that I was trying to solve, or a person I was trying to understand. It was just a shallow story. With pictures!

This book? This book is mine. This book is what my work should have been all along, but I had to go through a few things before I could comprehend what I want to say in this book. This subject is a puzzle, this topic is a series of ever larger questions, this story is a means of inhabiting and understanding another life and then explaining it as a way of inhabiting, understanding, and explaining an entirely alien time. It is a compulsion, a need, a calling that I cannot yet fully articulate.

Then, on the heels of the readers' reports, my proposal for a paper was accepted for a conference later this year -- in England! I've never been overseas. In fact, I've never been further out of the country than about a mile across each border, if that much. Fortunately, I just got my passport renewed. The new one will now get a stamp.*

In spite of my bitching and moaning, in spite of the furloughs, and the student loans, and everything else, I'm having one of those moments in which I feel like I'm living my real life, and that more of that real life is on its way.

Now, I have to quit the rambling warm-up for the day and get down to business.

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*An expired passport without a stamp is a sad sad thing indeed, let me tell you.